Various Artists

Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997

Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997 is the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—the Dance Mania label churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest.

Club music is easy to mock. Most people know someone skeptical or dismissive of it, a class clown-type who'll derisively mimic a cut by huffing "uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk" while goofily nodding his head. Heed this warning: Paul Johnson's "Feel My M.F. Bass" will be a boon to this person. Shrill and stone-stoopid, the song's refrain repeats as such: "Feel my moth-er-fuck-ing bass in your face/ Feel my moth-er-fuck-ing bass in your face." The rhythm, composed on a then-cheap, probably discarded drum machine, goes "uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk-uhnt-chk" except when it goes "unt-uhnt-uhnt-uhnt." The bass line sounds like...well, there is no bass line. But if you dropped this little chunk of rhythmic coal on the South or West side of Chicago in 1994, or if you drop it just about anywhere in Europe in 2014, people go wild.

"Feel My M.F. Bass" is a standout track from Hardcore Traxx: Dance Mania Records 1986-1997, the first-ever compilation to honor Chicago house music's coarse, brilliant, and suddenly trendy prodigal son. Best known for lewd, raw, high-tempo tracks—a style known then and now as ghetto house—Dance Mania churned out dozens of classic singles that rarely escaped the Midwest. The label was, essentially, primed to run as a modest small business: attract a dedicated, local following by using its paltry resources to shake as many asses as possible.

Ray Barney and Duane Buford started Dance Mania in 1985, running it through the 1990s. When Barney resurrected the label recently, he did it for the same reason he made so many of the choices that shaped Dance Mania: it seemed like a practical business decision. European DJs, it turned out, were paying hundreds of dollars for Dance Mania 12"s, and Barney had shelves full of unbought records in his basement.

This uptick in popularity found influential Russian DJ Nina Kraviz saying things like, "Sometimes I think that my only purpose of DJing is to play Dance Mania records!" to anyone who would listen. (Her loving, abstract ode to the label, "Ghetto Kraviz", was a smash.) Boysnoize curated a tribute album. When art-damaged misfit Actress toured America late in 2013, he brought Dance Mania mainstay Parris Mitchell with him. The label's earliest shoutout remains its biggest: "Teachers", Daft Punk's 1997 ode to their producer heroes not only namechecks many of Dance Mania's principals, it openly apes the Parris Mitchell Project's "Ghetto Shout Out!!"

The first third of Hardcore Traxx traces DM's early years, when it was releasing good but familiar first-wave Chicago house: diva-scorched anthems that implore you to jack your body and submit yourself to "house nation." After failing to land the type of European hit that buoyed peer labels like Traxx and DJ International, Barney—who, after college, helped turn his father's popular South side record store into a record distribution hub—leveraged his network of DJs to cater to the local market. Unable to afford studio time, Dance Mania producers recorded their tracks in their homes, often with little more than a drum machine and a sampler. The crass mantras needed not appeal to radio jocks and helped attract an audience increasingly interested in hip-hop.

Like garage rock or blues or any art that's trying to accomplish a lot with very little, a surprising amount of weirdness ensued. There's lots of grunting and wheezing on Hardcore Traxx; rappers sound like cartoons and MCs like carnal preachers. Dance Mania is a testament to the power of the riff. In the best DM tracks every single element functions as a hook: Uhn-chk-Uhn-chk-Ride-me-baby. Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.

For much of the 90s, DM's local focus shielded it from Europe's abandonment of first-wave American dance musics. The label just kept churning out tracks, eventually fostering ghetto house offshoots juke and footwork (footwork legends RP Boo and Traxman recorded for the label). Declining vinyl sales shuttered the label in 2001, but even that seems like a blessing. Dance Mania is one of the few early house labels to remain on good terms with most of its artists.

The success of ghetto house and Dance Mania was built on a really simple concept. You could hear Traxmen & Eric Martin's "Hit It from the Back" in a field rave in Wisconsin for the same reason you could hear it in a seedy Chicago club: it was (and still is) really good at making people grind their bodies against one another. The surge in popularity overseas no doubt stems in part from the fact that ghetto house is perhaps the only large American dance subgenre not to have been co-opted by Europe in the 1990s. But the local flavor—that of a neighborhood shop—persists. To hear "Ghetto Shout Out!!"'s call and response—"Cabrini-Green in this motherfucker? Hell yeah!"—is to hear how DM helped get off a lot of people who really, really needed to get off. And those who didn't need to get off, too. Say this about anyone who mocks "Feel my M.F. Bass": he will be feeling this lethally catchy, modestly conceived motherfucking bass in his face for days.